Northern Trust puts a West Coast head on its family office unit
The Chicago bank has hired Wilmington Trust's Candice Nakagawa to run Family Office Solutions across the western United States, in a market where private banks are competing for entrepreneurial wealth.
Northern Trust Wealth Management has appointed Candice Nakagawa as Family Office Solutions managing director for its West region. She is based in Los Angeles and reports to Pam Lucina, who heads the unit, according to the bank’s announcement on 10 August.
Nakagawa joins from Wilmington Trust, where she was executive vice president and Western Region president. Before that she was private wealth management market leader at U.S. Bank, and earlier held a series of leadership roles at MUFG Union Bank. She holds an MBA from the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California and a BA from the University of California, San Diego, and is a graduate of the Pacific Coast Banking School.
Family Office Solutions is Northern Trust’s answer to families whose affairs have outgrown a single adviser. The team coordinates outside advisers, works on governance, and pulls investment, fiduciary, tax, philanthropic and estate planning strategies into one place. Northern Trust Wealth Management reported US$534 billion under management at 30 June 2026; the wider group, founded in Chicago in 1889, held US$2.0 trillion under management and US$20.0 trillion under custody or administration on the same date.
“The West has seen decades of value creation, and many of today’s entrepreneurs and multigenerational families are looking for the coordination and institutional resources traditionally associated with a family office,” said Jason Tyler, president of Northern Trust Wealth Management.
An outsourced answer to a build-or-buy question
The hire is a small piece of a larger contest. Families reaching the point where their wealth needs full-time administration face a choice: hire staff and set up a single family office, or buy the same functions from a bank or a multi-family office. Institutions have spent the past two years expanding the second option, adding tax, estate and administrative capability rather than selling investment management alone.
Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle sit at the centre of that market. Wealth there tends to be recent, concentrated in one operating business or one block of equity, and held by owners who have not yet built the machinery around it. That profile favours whoever can supply the machinery quickly.
The governance gap underneath
There is a reason banks keep pointing at governance. UBS surveyed 307 family offices with an average family net worth of US$2.7 billion for its Global Family Office Report 2026 and found only 35 per cent had a defined succession plan in place, with 27 per cent running an organised process to prepare the next generation. Coordination, education and family governance are the parts of the job most single family offices postpone, and they are also the parts hardest to hire for in-house.
Whether an institution is the right place to source them is a separate question. A bank that coordinates a family’s advisers is also, usually, one of those advisers. Families weighing an outsourced model will want to know how the coordination role is fenced off from the product one, and who reviews the answer. That is a conversation about structure rather than personnel, and no appointment settles it.
